We’re excited about the global premiere of “One Day on Earth” at the United Nations this Sunday. The movie records the human experience over a 24-hour period using material crowd-sourced from all over the world.

Oxfam contributed footage to “One Day on Earth” film. We asked our affiliates and partners working in 99 countries across the world to reflect on the specific issues of health and education — and why these are fundamental rights — and then to seek out images and interviews on the subject.

Watch the trailer for the film (it gave me goose bumps…the good kind) and then share with your friends.

One Day on Earth – Global Screening Trailer from One Day on Earth on Vimeo.

Here’s a sample Tweet to get you going:

Oxfam contributed to the unique @onedayonearth documentary (all filmed on 10/10/10). Attend free screening this Sunday! http://ow.ly/aq53H

Ahmed wants his children to have an education and live in peace.

Representatives from governments around the world met at a conference in London last week to talk about the future of Somalia, where a recent famine and years of conflict have left nearly a third of the population in crisis.

In a briefing note, A Shift in Focus, Oxfam called for the development of a strategy that prioritizes the interests of ordinary Somalis.

What are those interests?

Our partners fanned out across the capital of Mogadishu and other parts of the country to ask, and what struck me was the frequency of one answer: education. People want their kids to have a chance to go to school—and a chance at the hope and possibility education promises for a new generation and the future of Somalia. Those are no small cravings in a country that has known nothing but strife for decades.

“We need support to strengthen local and community-owned administrations, and help us to build schools and hospitals,” said Haawo, a 50-year-old woman.

“The international community should provide huge humanitarian support for the ordinary people, with support for free education and scholarships in order to educate a large number of young people who will play key roles in the future of the country,” said 28-year-old Amino.

“I wish they will live without conflict and with free high quality education,” said Mohamed, 52, of his children.

But for many families, realizing the dream of education often means making the most painful of decisions: choosing between your children. Sa’ido, a 35-year-old mother who lives in the Benadir Region, has six children but eking a living from selling charcoal provides her with barely enough resources to send just two of them to school.

“The conflict, especially, has prevented us from sending our kids to school and earning enough for our daily food,” she said. And added to her concerns about the children she can’t afford to educate are her worries about those who are getting an education.

“I feel really frightened when I’m sending my kids to school…,” said Sa’ido.”…I wonder whether they will come home or not because the violence is increasing in the city.”

For Ahmed, a father of seven children, it’s not just the daily struggle to feed his family that weighs on him, it’s his inability to scrape together the fees to send them to school. At 58, finding a job in Mogadishu has been an enormous challenge.

“…In the morning I go out as a man who goes to a job, but the reality is that the life of my household relies on friendly begging to family and friends,” said Ahmed. “My children don’t go to school due to lack of proper income to pay the school fees.”

Shown in a picture standing on a rubble-strewn street, his brow deeply furrowed, Ahmed and his hopes speak to the urgency of Oxfam’s call to focus on ordinary folks, folks whose dreams are no different from our own.

“Children want to learn and go to school,” said Ahmed. “In the future, I am hopeful my children will have success and fortune with a high quality education (with) which they will live in peace.”

Basic services, like improved water sources, are needed in South Sudan, which will become the world's newest nation on Saturday, July 9. Photo: Caroline Gluck / Oxfam

This Saturday, July 9, South Sudan will become the world’s newest independent nation. Below, Oxfam’s program manager in Sudan, Augustino Buya, offers his perspective on this landmark event.

Augustino Buya was born in 1954, in Terekea in the south of Sudan, two years before independence from Egypt and the UK. In 1984 he became part of a local community self-help organization, which was an Oxfam partner. In 1987 he joined Oxfam, working his way up to program manager, a post he still holds today.

“Saturday for me as an individual is going to be a historic day because I have reached it alive. And also for all southerners it will be historical: whoever has reached that day will be happy,” said Buya.

“What I hope for the future is that there will be no going back to war. That’s what I hope.

Second, that there will be unity of the South Sudanese people to develop their new country. And that there will be good governance for the development of the Republic of South Sudan. With good governance there must be priorities. The priorities must be basic services, such as schools and healthcare, for the common man and woman.

The third priority must be the development of agriculture, to have enough food locally. These things cannot be done without good governance and support from the international community.

…I come from a family which was not educated. I am the only one who had access to education. And when I finished my education I promised to help my family.

Before I had my first child I was helping my brother’s four children. Now I have six of my own: that makes 10. This made me be very careful with my work and be committed.

Three of my brother’s children have graduated with a degree or a diploma, and so have my two eldest. The rest are still in school. I hope the new South Sudan will be an opportunity for them, because there will be a lot of opportunities and chances. That is why I’ll be happy on Saturday, when I reach it alive, because it means that for the rest of my life I know the small ones will get an education and opportunities.”

Villagers collect water from a rain-fed pond behind a new dam built to provide them with a reliable source. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Even as young teenager, Astbha Abraha knew there was only one way he could make a better life for himself and that was with an education. An interpreter, he told me the story of that schooling (see Part I) as we trundled in a truck through Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, on our way to the Raya Azebo district to visit a dam—one that holds a whole lot more than just water.

A remote place of rocky hills and plains, some of the district’s villages have been plagued by lack of water, and in 2008, the situation in Boye Gararsa became critical when rains failed to come, triggering acute food and water shortages—conditions Abraha knew well from his own childhood in Tigray. Together with the government and a local partner, the Women’s Association of Tigray, Oxfam America helped respond to the villages’ needs with a solution intended to solve the water problem for good: a micro dam. Read the rest of this entry »

Atsbha Abraha got his first taste of school when his family was resettled in Gambella. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

At home, we’ve been in the throes of college prep, a process that somehow involves the entire family–except the dog.  My son is a senior in high school and he has spent this academic year applying to a bunch of places, fretting over essays, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the all-mighty Admissions Office to say yes—or no.

He’s in. And so are all of his friends.

That’s how life—in their world—is: Step by predictable step, they will get their educations. It’s as good as guaranteed.

But that certainty, that unquestioned assumption about opportunity, sometimes makes me wince, especially when I think about people like Atsbha Abraha and the many years of struggle he bore to earn  his own degree. An interpreter who helped me recently while I was visiting Oxfam America programs in Ethiopia, Abraha is a young father of 32 from Tigray, a rugged region in the north where many people eke a living from the small plots of land they farm and the few milking animals they own. Life there is hard for many—and in some years, impossible. Read the rest of this entry »

Meena Amirir says all human beings have the right to go to school. Photo by Louise Hancock/Oxfam

I can only begin to imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t know how to read, if books and a daily newspaper weren’t part of my diet, if I couldn’t decipher the train schedule or track the supermarket ads, if highway signs were incomprehensible and recipes were just a jumble of symbols. I’d feel trapped. And helpless.

What must the women in Afghanistan feel?

Just 12 percent of them over the age of 15 are literate. That means that countless women in one of the poorest nations in the world must depend on others to navigate much of their lives, a dependence that can’t help but weigh heavily on a country desperate for development. Read the rest of this entry »

Demitu Gurmessa weeds her field. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Demitu Gurmessa and her husband, Hussein Kedir, are sitting on a long wooden bench in the dirt yard outside their home in Jello Dida—a community in the Shashamene District of Ethiopia. Nestled with them are some of their nine children.

Demitu holds out her hand to me so I can feel her palm—rough with the countless chores required to keep her family fed, housed, and clothed. Hussein holds out his, too. It feels just like his wife’s, a hand toughened by work in the fields. For poor people in Ethiopia, that’s what life is; they are bound to hard physical labor—to plowing and planting patches of earth, to fetching water and firewood, to herding goats, sheep, and cattle.

But the couple’s hands are tough for another reason: They are determined to send their children to school, and so to make sure the kids have the time for that pursuit, Demitu and Hussein are shouldering all the work other parents in rural Ethiopia might require their offspring to do. Two of their children have already finished 10^th grade and taken national exams; two others are now in 10^th grade; and one is in fourth grade. Read the rest of this entry »

Read Part I of this blog.

In my mind’s eye, I’ve been seeing the stern expression of Marie Camel Rubin as she posed for a picture, and the serious look on the face of her son, Noel Jolins, standing close to her, his fate sealed in the field they were weeding.

I was in Haiti, in Nippes, and we had just met the pair in a field of manioc, corn, and beans—a place Noel , 8, was spending a good portion of his time since having to leave school because his mother did not have enough money to send him.

I thought about them when we pulled into a hotel in Petite Riviere de Nippes that evening and there, hunched in their chairs, was a small crowd of school children each with their own sturdy green and white laptop. They had come to the hotel to borrow its electricity—kindly offered by hotel owner Emmanuel Pressoir—and his wireless connection. Their town has neither. They looked up just briefly, and smiled in a distracted way when I asked if I could snap their picture, before getting lost again in their on-screen projects.

It turns out that the computers are part of an initiative their school—Complexe Education St. Antoine et St. Augustin, just down the road—launched last year as a pilot, expanded this year with 50 more computers, and will grow again in the summer when 200 additional laptops arrive. The machines are part of the One Laptop per Child program founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte.

Pressoir plays a role in the American Haitian Foundation which helps to fund the school, where he also serves as treasurer. Painted bright pink, the school has about 900 students in grades one through 12—and offers each of them a meal every day, no small gesture in a country where many people struggle to feed their families.
For Pressoir, feeding minds is essential, too. And that’s why he’s happy to let the kids come to his salt-splashed rotunda by the sea, plug into the rusty outlets, and dive into their laptops.

“It’s not only looking on the Internet,” he says. “It’s developing their minds.”

That ‘s a mantra that all of Haiti could use.

Chrisner Roche is among many Haitians who have sent his children to school in Port-au-Prince because there are few educational options in the rural area where he lives.

The plight of Chrisner Roche is a textbook case for all that’s wrong with the educational system in Haiti.

As rain pelted the metal roof, Roche lifted specimen jars from a shelf, ticking off their contents and examining the embryos one by one. This was a rabbit, that one a pig. Here was a goat. And here was a whole jar of intestinal parasites, grown long and fat.

We were in the common room of the Centre de Salignac, an agricultural research, training, and local development facility high in the hills of Nippes in southern Haiti. A complex of stone-walled buildings, the center works with local farmers to produce high-quality seeds and cuttings, and is a source for the tens of thousands of yam cuttings Oxfam Quebec has distributed to farmers across Haiti.

Roche is the Salignac’s director and the rural life seems to suit him: He has been connected with the center since 1978 and has been working in the area since he finished school. But he’s here alone among the rolling green hills and open sky—without his wife and children. Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Gertz is a freelance journalist, editor, and blogger covering the environment, technology, science, and sustainability. She reported on the Copenhagen climate talks on behalf of Oxfam America.

They say the impacts of climate change are “blind” to class, creed, or gender.

But activists in Copenhagen say, in reality, women in poor countries bear the brunt of global warming’s terrible human cost.

In the province of Balochistan, near the Afghani border, the shifting climate has been disastrous for traditional family structure and stability, according to Rehana Bibi Khilji. “The common woman in our area of rural Pakistan is very impacted,” said Khilji, founder of Balochistan human rights group Hope PK.

L to R: Constance Okollet, Ulamila Kurai Wragg, Rehana bibi Khilji, Lorena Aguilar Revelo, Mary Robinson, and the moderator, Danish journalist Lene Johansen. Photo by Emily Gertz.

She was one of several panelists speaking before an audience of around 200 at today’s “Women’s Leadership on Climate Justice” program in Copenhagen — women who have seen firsthand the damage done by changing environmental conditions, agricultural cycles, and water supplies. Read the rest of this entry »